Before the Great Fire of 1666

The London Charterhouse

The new museum in the Charterhouse in Charterhouse Square in London officially opens to the public as of today, and – good news – admission is free. Guided tours of the site are also available, although a charge is payable for these.

The original Charterhouse, or “Chartrouse”, a Carthusian monastery, was built in 1371 by Sir Walter (de) Manny, “a stranger born, lord of the town of Manny, in the diocese of Cambray, beyond the seas, who for service done to Edward III was made Knight of the Garter” (Stow). In fact, the site was first consecrated as a burial ground for victims of the “Black Death” in 1348-9 (again as Stow put it, “A great pestilence … overspread all England, so wasting the people that scarce the tenth person of all sorts was left alive, and churchyards were not sufficient to receive the dead, but men were forced to choose out certain fields for burial”).

During the Reformation, between 1535-40, the Prior, John Houghton and six Carthusian monks from the London Charterhouse were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, for refusing to take an oath acknowledging the king as the head of the church, most of them at Tyburn. And in 1537, a further nine monks died, or rather were allowed to die, of starvation, in gaol at Newgate.

After the associated Dissolution of the Monasteries, the site became a private residence, originally owned by Sir Edward North, the Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, from 1545; and then a charitable alms-house and school founded by a bequest by Thomas Sutton, the one-time Master of the Ordnance in the Northern Parts and the richest man in England, from 1611 (the school relocated to Godalming in Surrey in 1872).

Remarkably, much still survives here from the Medieval to post-Medieval, Tudor to Stuart period, either in its original state, or restored thereto by Seely and Paget following damage sustained during an incendiary bombing raid in 1941.

Perhaps the most notable buildings, fragments of buildings or fitments are Sutton’s memorial in what is now the Chapel, but was once the Chapter House, dating to 1614;

North’s Great Hall, dating at least in part to the 1540s;

his Great Chamber, also dating at least in part to the 1540s, and one of the finest in all England, where Queen Elizabeth I more than once held court, at great cost to her host;

Wash-House Court, dating back to the early 1530s, in the case of the brick buildings, and to an even earlier part of the monastic period, in the case of the stone ones;

and the doorway to “Cell B”, in the Norfolk Cloister, complete with its guichet or serving hatch, dating all the way back to the time of the original foundation of the monastery in 1371.

A Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) monograph describes in detail the findings of recent archaeological excavations at the Charterhouse site. Another describes, among other things, the burials from the “Black Death” burial ground that only came to light during excavations at the associated “Crossrail” development site in 2015.

Charterhouse is visited, although not entered, on our “Historic Smithfield, Clerkenwell and Holborn” standard walk, and on our “Medieval London” and “Tudor and Stuart London” themed specials.

Further details of all our walks are available in the Our Guided Walks section of this web-site.